The sequence repeats after the image has made the full circle.
A slower-loading version of this page with larger pictures is also available.

These images illustrate how an RF-LISSOM network responds to
oriented lines before self-organization. It's easiest to understand
them if you first start with the self-organized
version. Box (g) shows an orientation map measured for an RF-LISSOM
network before self-organization; each neuron is represented by the
color of the orientation it prefers. The colors for each orientation
are shown in the key beside it. At this point, the orientation
preference is random for each neuron, which is why the colors look
like static.

The animated panels show the response of this simulated cortex to a
single blurry line at the center of the retina, using the same color
code for each neuron. The rotating grey line (a) shows the input
presented to the retina. The fuzzy colored areas (b) show which
neurons responded at the instant the activation reached the cortex.
For this simulation, the neurons have been initialized to respond to
the location on the retina corresponding to their location in the
cortex, which is why the activity shows up in the center of the cortex
for this input in the center of the retina. The histogram adjacent to
the initial response (c) shows the total amount of activation in the
initial response for orientation detectors of each type. The
sharply defined areas (d) show the neurons still responding after
lateral interactions have taken place. Finally, the second histogram
(e) shows the total amount of activation in the settled response, for
each type of orientation detector.

Clearly, this network is not encoding orientation: the histogram of
activated units remains almost entirely flat regardless of the input.
Moreover, the network is to a large extent not even
preserving orientation. Due to settling by the lateral
interactions, the activation pattern barely differs at all as the
input is varied, remaining a nearly circular blob. This suggests one
reason why orientation preference is such a prominent feature of the
earliest cortical areas; if it weren't encoded there, orientation
information would be lost forever.